


Shoot To Kill

by uglowian



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe, Angst, Challenge Response, Other, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 03:50:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1102069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uglowian/pseuds/uglowian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>written for the 2011 Zombie Apocalypse Ficathon. </p>
<p>prompt: asoiaf - jaime/cersei - <i>i am drowning / there is no sign of land / you are coming down with me / hand in unlovable hand / and i hope you die / i hope we both die</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Shoot To Kill

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for: violence, character death, and vague descriptions of sickness

The sickness begins in his hand.  
  
He knows exactly how it happened; shards of glass along the jagged line of the crumbling wall, and he'd been careless. One bright edge lodged in his palm (an ironic, iconic injury; a blossoming stigmata), and he'd cursed and pulled it free. She watched him do it without saying a word, because there'd been nothing to say.  
  
There's nothing to do, either. They don't have any medical supplies; no gauze, no thread, no needle to stitch up the oozing trench dug in his flesh. Fever descends.  
  
He stumbles after her for two days. On the third day, in the middle of a greying field, he falls down and doesn't get up. She lifts him, forcibly, to his feet, and slings his arm over her shoulder. His festering hand smells of decay, and pinkish pus leaves streaks upon her rotting shirt. She makes him walk.  
  
He tries to tell her not to look so grim, tries to drawl that, all things considered, it could be worse. They're alone out here, in this pale wasteland, and that's a gift, to be sure. They could still be running from the shambling monsters that reek of death; had that been the case, they most certainly would be dead. She's very good with a gun (or maybe she's just ruthless), but they only have so many bullets, and it's terribly hard to aim when you have your ailing brother weighing you down.  
  
He tries to tell her all these things, but the words get stuck on cracked lips and a too-dry tongue. He mumbles incoherencies into the indifferent air and she doesn't answer him at all.   
  
The fever makes the world dissolve. He forgets whole portions of his waking moments, the days drifting apart in bright fragments. He's hot all over and thirsty and delirious. Three times over, he thinks he dies.  
  
Chills come eventually, and with them, a new awareness, jagged and painful. In those moments, he knows an agony so acute that it consumes him like an unholy visitation upon his flesh, his hand swelling and burning and contorting hugely. He wakes in sweats and shivers, and can't remember having fallen asleep.  
  
On some indeterminate day, he regains lucidity, the fever broken. Small miracles, he supposes. He sees that she has dragged them underground (a storm basement? a fallout shelter? he wonders but is too tired to ask). Dark earth looms over them and she sits beside him, her hair hanging down in matted tangles over her shoulders like so many filthy ropes. She's pulling things out of her knapsack and arranging them in precise order on the dirt.  
  
They have but few possessions to their name, now, these golden twins who once owned half the world. A paring knife. A sawed-off shotgun. A tin of bullets and a tin of jerky. A bowl for catching rainwater, two lighters, and a canister of alcohol, clear as summer days long lost. Amidst it all, a lantern flashlight, alight now, reflecting incandescence in her eyes.   
  
She fingers the flat of the paring knife. When he says her name, she looks at him.  
  
"The hand has to come off," she says quietly.  
  
"Does it?" It seems an incredible effort, to have to amputate a hand.  
  
"It's turning."  
  
He looks and he can see that she's right. His whole hand has turned bloated and black, up to the wrist. He thinks of the monsters, with their sloughing faces and their festering blood.  
  
"I could still turn," he croaks. "Even without the hand." A bleeding stump, after all, is as susceptible to infection as a sliced-open palm.  
  
"It's worth the attempt," she says and the words are void of all volition.  
  
"I'd rather die."  
  
She narrows her green eyes. "You idiot."  
  
He looks at her. "I'm sorry."  
  
They sit in silence for a very long time. When she speaks again, she trains her eyes on the lantern.  
  
"If you go, I'll have to follow you."  
  
"I know."  
  
"I hate you."  
  
He has nothing to say to that, so he stays silent. Eventually, she reaches for the tin of bullets. She loads two down the shotgun barrel.  
  
"This is a mercy," he whispers, as she stands and takes her aim.  
  
She makes a noise that might be a laugh, but she isn't smiling. He closes his eyes and thinks that this is good. There won't be enough left of him (or, more specifically, of his head) to crawl out of the earth, later. To chase the horizon in some slumped-over loping, a nightmarish simian moving without intent across a vast, intestate earth.   
  
He says her name, again.   
  
There is a violent noise, a resounding blast, and then there is no sound at all.


End file.
